The rise of Dropbox

Recently, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced new ways for apps to save and load user data.

Apart from just a set of developer tools, Houston presented the new Dropbox Platform as a medium to “replace the hard drive.” The Dropbox Platform was expected to provide simpler ways to store files in the cloud, along with simple buttons that developers could add to the apps. It also lets apps save their own data, so that your work in an Android app could easily be carries over to iOS, and vice versa.

“Today,” Houston mentioned, “the hard drive goes away.”

Houston’s proclamations did certainly make some great headlines, but as the Dropbox was trying its best to do away with the storage woes of the post-PC era, it somehow was also creating new headaches when the concern came to storing more of our lives in the cloud.

The company however wanted to make sure that one should never have to worry about whether they had saved their work on their iPhone, Nexus 7, or Windows PC—similar to what Microsoft was trying to do with the SkyDrive. In the case of Dropbox the data would always follow you, so that you would not even have to think about it.

The seamless availability that Dropbox promises does sound enticing, but it also came with its own drawbacks and concerns whereas these concerns existed even before the announcement of Dropbox Platform. The bigger potential pitfall with allowing Dropbox to work instead of the hard drive, was the headache that it could possibly create when you ran out of storage.

Hard drives alone weren’t the future, but nor were they relics of the past.

But that did not mean that the hard drive wasn’t becoming more problematic.

But like every other out of proportion claim regarding the fall of something in technology, Dropbox was not initially meant to replace the hard drive outright. Instead, it was poised to supplement local storage, thus making it easier to move between devices.

We all may soon become more reliant on the Dropbox than ever, but instead of abandoning our hard drives, what we could do is consider, literally and figuratively, about the price that we’re willing to pay for the privilege.